David Cage Re-examined

I mentioned this a few weeks ago, and no doubt readers on the up-and-up are aware of this already, but about two weeks ago, French game designer most well known for games like Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, David Cage, held a speech at the D.I.C.E. (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada.  The speech in question was titled "The Peter Pan Syndrome: The Industry that Refused to grow up."  During the speech, Cage gave his vision of the present and future state of the video game industry.  The speech in its entirety is in the video below.

Cage's claim that the industry refuses to grow up comes from the top-selling games of all time only being limited to a handful of genres and repetitive themes in games.  Cage's heavy emphasis on repetitive themes is explained through games like Wolfenstein carrying on into current games such as Call of Duty, pointing out that most games are based on violent actions or platforming.

Those who read my post two weeks ago may have already gleaned that I do not think favorably of David Cage's presentation.  The enormous amount of generalization done in his speech is ridiculous. There are plenty of games out there that don't fit into his formula; games like survival horror Silent Hill, creativity sinks like Minecraft, or even simple puzzle games like Tetris.

Cage then goes onto say that the audience for games hasn't changed either.  This is of course, completely ridiculous, as it was only in the last ten or fifteen years that figures of the industry used the word "casual" to refer to a genre of games.  Everything Cage has called the industry out on so far can be easily argued against with multiple example, assuming that "But will it make money?" won't be used as a counter-argument.

However, I'm not going to snub David Cage just for challenging the way that gamers think.  There are some nuggets of truth in what he said.  In fact, the rise of casual gaming was a marketing strategy by Nintendo.  There used to be a brilliant article on it called "Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy" that has unfortunately disappeared from the internet that detailed how Nintendo conquered the casual market simply because other companies had no clue that it even existed.  Appealing to an older market like Cage suggests could recreate this success by targeting a crowd that the gaming industry hasn't really paid much attention to.

Past that, Cage talks about how traditional gaming is under pressure from digital distribution and platforms such as Android and iOS gaming.  He then mentions how lack of innovation is a problem within the gaming industry.  He moves onto mentioning that story isn't a big focus in the industry, and that this issue can be solved by connecting better with Hollywood, and letting writers from movies tackle that aspect of gaming.  Cage's talk on censorship is also an interesting point.  Lots of games only really use their "M" rating to allow copious amounts of blood to be spilled.  Cage's talk about how games should address sexuality or other "taboo" ideas is fantastic.  Cage claims that movies and television are allowed to go much further than games can, and that as long as it's in context, there should be no reason to censor violence and sexuality within video games.

That being said, I have to move on to some criticisms: I really want to hear what kind of games Cage would think will appeal to an as of now non-existent market.  Cage never really details what kind of people these would be, so it's difficult to plan around no details, but wasn't the whole point of the "casual game boom" so that people who wouldn't normally play games would be more inclined to do so?  It seems like Cage is telling the industry to corner a market that has already been targeted.  If Cage means to appeal to the elderly or intellectuals for example, then should we treat this as its own niche?  I guess that's what Cage is going for, but again, casual games already fulfill that to a degree.  Cage should be showing us what kinds of ideas he has to accomplish this goal before we'll listen more closely.

Additionally, Cage's own game, Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit outside of the U.S.) had multiple scenes censored, but kept a handful because they had context.  While it shows maturity to call out your own mistakes, isn't it sort of hypocritical to cite your own mistakes as something that should be avoided in order to lend credibility to the industry?  Furthermore, games like Silent Hill 2 and Catherine embraced these censorship limitations in their plot, which serve as a sort of counterpoint to Cage's insistence that game companies should be inspired by Hollywood when creating plots.  Silent Hill 2's use of symbolism allowed the player to explore and interpret it themselves in a great example of showing versus telling, and Catherine had cutscenes that intentionally showed little to no "explicit" content in order to throw the player for a loop in an ensuing plot twist.  Additionally, I'll leave it up to the reader to decide if games are as heavily censored as Cage seems to think they are by linking an article that I recently at the end of this post. The article is about how the American publisher of the aforementioned Catherine, Atlus U.S.A. managed to convince family-friendly retailers like Wal-Mart and Target to stock Catherine by showing these retailers scenes from the games that these stores already stocked that contained scenes more explicit than the ones found in their product.

Which must have felt like a slap in the face to the companies that Atlus called out.

Even with these "less is more" examples that embrace the limitations imposed upon them, the problem that Cage appears to have is that he assumes that every game has to be about shooting or punching or driving cars.  The fact that he seems so obsessed with cramming meaning into a game or crafting a game with no guns seems silly when you consider games like Spec Ops: The Line or Journey when the former is a shooter with a deep message behind it and the latter fits into both categories that Cage mentions.  Admittedly, for every game with a deeper meaning like Catherine there are a dozen testosterone-driven Call of Duty or other such games.

Another conundrum within Cage's speech is that he talks about how games are different because they're an interactive medium, yet he says that writers for movies - which are a distinctly non-interactive medium - should be involved with video games.  Are movie writers better qualified to incorporate interactive options into a script than programmers?  Cage also talks about how huge talents from Hollywood should be incorporated into video games despite the industry already using legions of established voice actors on a regular basis, as well as there being the inverse of past games like Apocalypse touting the big-name actors they pulled on board, but ultimately only amounting to having a famous guy talking.  If we've already got tons of willing actors at hand, why should we uproot them to bring in people who may not even do a better job?

A voice actor on Twitter voicing his opinion on David Cage's speech.

Here's how I see it: Cage is frustrated at the current state of the industry because they're less accepting of riskier, experimental titles like the ones he has designed in the past.  That's fine, it's alright to be upset with the system.  Remember when George Lucas made the original trilogy of Star Wars?  How about all those incredible Spielberg movies like Jaws, E.T. and The Duel from the 70's and 80's?  They were both discontent with the system and rebelled against it.  Challenging the system is a great way to improve the quality of yourself and the ones around you by showing everybody what can be done when you flaunt established convention.  That being said, I've spent this whole blog post poking holes in Cage's argument, so why should the industry try something this problematic if it doesn't sound good?  David Cage's games are notorious for having little interactivity and being more along the lines of movies that involve button-pressing now and then.  David Cage's solutions come off as attempts to make the game industry conform to his vision of art in an interactive medium, despite the limited interactivity of his projects.  Cage's vision of "risky, ambitious games" doesn't match up with what he provides, so unless Cage puts his own games on the line then I really don't see how to make the game industry buy into it.

Additionally, a friend on Facebook linked an article shortly before I planned on publishing this post with quotes from Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear Solid fame detailing one of his upcoming projects.  In the article, Kojima claims that the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes will contain "taboo"" content and may not sell if it even gets published.  However, Kojima stated that "I'm approaching the project as a creator and prioritizing creativity over sales."  While I haven't been following Metal Gear Solid much (I only just got my first taste of the franchise this January with Metal Gear Solid 3D: Snake Eater!) this is the kind of attitude that David Cage should have brought to the table; rather than telling us these good ideas on how to rework the industry, he should have manned up and shown the industry what kind of fruits can be borne by having the guts to start such a project rather than telling the industry how to solve something that he sees as a problem.  It's the classic match-up of showing vs. telling, and I've spent far too many posts detailing something so basic to talk about it all over again.

Further Reading:
The blog belonging to the person who wrote the "Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy" article that I mentioned
D.I.C.E. Summit's official website
Kotaku's article on Atlus U.S.A. and publishing of Catherine
Eurogamer's article on Kojima's comments about the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes

Blazblue as a franchise: no Vision and no Relevancy

Blazblue is a multi-faceted series; not only am I criticizing it for its unoriginal ideas, but its bad gameplay as well.  Chances are good that I wouldn't have ragged on Blazblue's story and characters as much in my previous post if it was a solid fighting game.  It's not, and honestly, a lot of the mechanics in Blazblue's newest installment Chrono Phantasma are toxic in a competitive and casual environment.  If the series started out with a shot in the knee because it attempted to recreate Guilty Gear's success, then the whole franchise is in the process of being dragged out to the parking lot and beaten senseless by its creators with the bad decisions being implemented.  Before Chrono Phantasma was announced, a new installment of Guilty Gear was announced.  Adding insult to injury, Arc System Works' Persona 4: Arena received great acclaim for being easy to pick up without pandering too much to newcomers to the franchise owing to it being the sequel to a role-playing game, which was supposed to be one of Blazblue's main selling points back when the series was first announced.  Take into account that a new revision of Guilty Gear - the game Blazblue was created to entirely to profit off of! - has already been rereleased on PSN and XBox Live and is recieving an update, and Blazblue: Chrono Phantasma is already irrelevant as a fighting game despite not even having come out on consoles yet.

Firstly, let's talk about three good fighting games that really scratch my one-on-one deathmatch itch.  Street Fighter III: Third Strike is probably the least balanced and certainly the oldest of the three, having been released in 1999.  It makes my list for having the balls to innovate the already established Street Fighter II cast and having the parrying mechanic.  Parrying is the precursor to the Focus Attack mechanic from Street Fighter IV, which allowed a character to absorb a hit while preparing for an attack.  Parrying in Street Fighter III completely negates damage, but can only be performed right as an opponent's attack hits you, requiring very precise timing.  However, with this difficult technique comes a greater benefit; parrying successfully leaves the character in a neutral state, able to continue parrying attacks or leaving them in an optimal position to unleash a counterattack.  In the following video, note how both characters parry each others' attacks, though Ken's lengthy parrying saves him at the very end.

Arc System Works' Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core and Persona 4: Arena are more balanced than Third Strike, but none of the mechanics have the same impact that Street Fighter III's high-risk, high-reward Parrying does.  Instead, they both focus on great characters and solid fundamentals, and while Persona 4: Arena does have a Comeback Mechanic in the form of Awakening - increased defense and special meter as well as an extra super attack when your character's health drops below a certain point - a skilled player can completely bypass this by defeating their opponent before this can occur, and the defense boost only really shuts down single attacks and smaller combos, requiring more thought to be put into every action.  Guilty Gear is sort of a "happy medium" between Persona 4: Arena and Third Strike in that it is modestly balanced between the two and has no comeback mechanics.

To those not really familiar with fighters, you may be wondering what exactly constitutes a comeback mechanic?  Put simply, it's a facet of the game that gives players that aren't doing as well an added advantage.  A good example from outside of a fighting game would be in Mario Kart, where you get better items when your placement is lower in a race.  It's fine ordinarily, but most people play fighting games to see who's better.  Plenty of fighting games like Guilty Gear and Street Fighter appear at enormous tournaments where hundreds of people compete to see who the best is.  If a winner emerges because they were helped back up, then why should it be treated as anything but a hollow victory?  Imagine if when a team scored a touchdown in football, the other team was given the opportunity for a PAT instead of the team on the offensive.  It wouldn't make any sense because it would punish the team that managed to make the effort of scoring in the first place.

A real-life example of a comeback mechanic from the 2012 Olympics.

Comeback mechanics aren't anything new either; they've been appearing in fighters like Street Fighter 4 and Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and the fact that the company creates games that encourage competitive play but promotes mechanics that don't promote as much skill is mind-boggling.  This could easily tie into last week's post about how Blazblue has no clue how to do anything new, but I'll let that slide for now.  All you really need to know is that Blazblue: Chrono Phantasma implements a comeback mechanic.  The issue with such a mechanic that the risk vs. reward is skewed in favor of the player who has performed poorly.  As a counter-example, Street Fighter III gave resources (super meter) both to players attacking and being attacked, but gave more to the player on the offensive, incentivizing the player on the offensive to continue being aggressive while also incentivizing the player on the receiving end to fight back in order to get the resources that they needed to win.  At the same time, its parrying could be used by either player in an attempt to thwart an aggressive opponent or shut out an opponent who was already on the ropes at any point in the match.

While there are improvements made in the new Blazblue such as toning down the ridiculously long combos and damage, the speed of the game was increased as well.  As it stands, fighting games in the same vein as Blazblue, like Guilty Gear and King of Fighters XIII, aren't really played in the U.S. because of their speed.  In my opinion Chrono Phantasma's speed increase will only really serve to alienate players accustomed to the modest pacing of the previous Blazblue titles as well as prevent interested parties from actually buying the game.  As of now, Blazblue is something of a middle child among the fighting games that populate Arc System Works' roster, discounting the ridiculous one-offs like Fist of the North Star and the criminally under appreciated Battle Fantasia.  It's younger than the experience and reliable big brother Guilty Gear but older than the rising star younger sibling Persona 4: Arena, and as a result it has no real identity in terms of gameplay or story.  It attempts to parrot its more competent family with little success, and with no features to make it unique among games with three-man tag teams like Marvel vs Capcom or King of Fighters or a functional gimmick like Persona 4: Arena's Personas make it feel thinly spread in its desperate please to other game's fanbases.  The next installment of Blazblue needs to be game-changing in order for the series to remain relevant among a crowd that vastly outclasses it.

The image used can be found at the following article: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/boxing-judge-expelled-olympics-controversial-decision-170133250--oly.html

A Lack of Vision

The trouble with hinting at a definite subject of discussion long beforehand is that with all the issues that have popped up lately - the virtual boycotting of Ninja Theory's DmC, David Cage's disastrous commentary on the industry at D.I.C.E. and shipment problems with Fire Emblem: Awakening and Ni no Kuni - what I'm going to talk about this week feels pretty small-time by comparison, no matter how timely it is.  The good news is that this blog is going to be weekly from now on as part of a class I'm taking at VCU, so I'll at least be able to touch on a few of these with some manner of timeliness.  Anyway, continuing from last time, I said I'd talk about the story of a game that I'm not fond of.  Since I usually end up writing this introductory paragraph after everything else, I see now that such a claim was misleading in that I really don't talk about the story of Arc System Works' Blazblue franchise from a sense that I talk about the written plot and dialogue.  This post focuses on the how the characters have no real vision behind them - instead focusing on the franchise's weakness of parroting other successful franchises - and how this game feels less like its own idea than it does an amalgam of everything else that's been successful ever.

Blazblue's central character, Ragna.  The red trenchcoat + white hair + big sword formula has probably only been used about a dozen times before.

Starting from square one is necessary to prove my point; Guilty Gear was a fighting game created in 1999 by Arc System Works.  The game was successful enough to garner several sequels, its most distinct aspect being the emphasis on rock soundtracks - a rarity at the time - and references to heavy metal in its characters and story.  Blazblue was created in 2008 as a result of the copyright controversy that arose after Guilty Gear publisher Sammy was absorbed by another game publisher, Sega.  In order to continue making high-quality competitive fighting games in the same vein as Guilty Gear without breaching the copyright conflict, Toshimichi Mori created and designed Blazblue, a spiritual successor to Guilty Gear's signature style.  Blazblue was also a chance for Arc to start from scratch with a newly budding arcade scene, and changed several game mechanics to help broaden its appeal.  In the long and short, Blazblue's initial iteration, subtitled Calamity Trigger, succeeded; it became a popular addition to arcades, and it became a staple at tournaments.  That being said, Blazblue failed to measure up to Guilty Gear in the character and storytelling department.  I'll air out the dirty laundry immediately, neither of the games have very good stories; they're both messy attempts to justify all these badasses fighting each other.  However, Guilty Gear's story is told well though, with a lot of subtle hints in the story and setting department that help the already unique characters shine, preventing it from becoming becoming another faceless fighting game in today's figurative mob of fighting games.  This post is an attempt to point out what's been done wrong in the past to get you up to speed for Blazblue's next installment; Blazblue: Chrono Phantasma.

Because Blazblue's initial intent was to succeed an already popular series. Street Fighter III before it proved having no familiar faces makes a reboot a tough sell, which is why Capcom put established characters Ryu and Ken in to help give the game a "face" to work with.  Ordinarily a new cast isn't a bad thing: the aforementioned Street Fighter III started over fresh and has one of the most memorable casts of characters I can think of off the top of my head.  While tossing the bulk of the series' established cast was a risky move, the shock was lessened by taking established character's traits and mixing them with new concepts that let them all stand out despite being reworks of older ideas, either through having unusual variations on existing moves - Yang's sequential slashes overlap with Fei-Long's series of punches and Hugo's body press is essentially Zangief's piledriver - or by straight up making their moves as unusual as possible, like Urien and Q's flashy super moves.  Blazblue does a terrible job of this though: it only grabs the most obvious of Guilty Gear's that it can, and rather than using them as a springboard to reach new heights simply copies all Guilty Gear's sillier decisions without trying to have them make sense on their new characters.  The most egregious example I can think of being main character Ragna forgoing his giant weapon for a lot of his attacks in the same vein as Sol, despite Sol's sword being the source of the fire that shows up for most of his special attacks.  Ragna's lifestealing abilities are shown to be used without his sword several times, which makes it all the more weird to watch Ragna wear his sword like a decoration and then all of a sudden use it for only one or two of his attack animations.  Another example is werewolf character Valkenhayne, whose signature move mimics that of Jon Talbain, another werewolf from Capcom's Darkstalkers series of fighting games who fights using kung-fu.  Rather than innovate, Blazblue's cast just uses these attacks to mimic the characters that inspired them, often in a manner that isn't consistent with hoe they're presented.  It feels like how Homer Simpson becomes more and more stupid as The Simpsons goes on just for the sake of being more stupid.

Bizarrely enough Blazblue also suffers from the opposite problem in its Story Mode.  Noel, the leading female character of Blazblue, is established to be a shy character, typically timid, but has a strong sense of justice, going hand in hand with her being an officer of the law.  That being said, she rarely ever shows any form of competence in the game's story.  She gets bullied to the point of crying by Rachel, is uncomfortable around her friends because she has smaller breasts than them, and takes it too hard when total stranger Taokaka makes fun of her for it. To cap it off, she gets shamelessly exploited for the sake of fanservice by Litchi in a gag ending, being chased around and dressed in several different sets of suggestive clothing with no real repercussions.  Because it's a gag ending, we're supposed to accept this as humor, but since it's consistent with how meekly Noel has been portrayed, it just reinforces Noel's general ineffectiveness as a leading character.  Sure you could argue that she's supposed to get beaten around because of the breakdown she has at the end of Continuum Shift, but you'd be wrong.  That scene is plot-driven and is there to force her to play a part in the villain's plan.  The earlier examples of her exploitation have no relevance to the plot, yet we're forced to see her cry and in general be bullied, taking it much harder than a character so relevant to the plot should be.  It undermines her effectiveness as a character when she whines and cries all the time, and feels sickening and exploitative to her as a whole.

Honestly, the gag endings as a whole feel silly - not in the haha way that they should - and out of place.  While it's understandable that a joke ending should be silly and unusual, hardly any of them actually feel like they're playing to their character's funnier aspects and just try and jam in as much out of context humor as possible.  The only time that the gag endings work is when they center around Bang, whose character revolves being as over the top as possible.  Games like Guilty Gear never implemented gag endings because they were unnecessary.  Pretty much every character was unusual in some way and a lot of the game's humor came from their interactions with the other bizarre members of the cast.  Even in the case of straight shooters like Ky and Slayer, one could always count on Faust or Bridget to show up and make things hilarious.

Interestingly, the American publisher for the series is renowned for their excellent localizations.  I can only guess that they included a tired pop culture reference to accurately capture how unfunny these gag endings are.

The last physical aspect of characters that I'll touch upon is the clothing that the characters wear.  It may feel like nitpicking, but I promise that I'm trying to make a point.  Blazblue has this motif of mixing Japanese and western clothing.  I guess it's supposed to contrast, but all it does is make these characters feel disjointed, like they didn't know what they wanted to wear.  It's even more odd now that a character for Chrono Phantasma - Amane - is supposed to be full-on Japanese and wears all Japanese clothing.  It feels so strange because Jin's full name is clearly Japanese, yet he doesn't share Amane's cultural taste in clothing.  It all contrasts poorly with the mixed motifs for other characters, like Ragna's hakama pants and Devil May Cry-esque trenchcoat or Tager's bizarre samurai skirt.  It clashes pretty hard with characters like Noel and Carl who wear full-on "western" style clothes.  This frustrating lack of consistency makes it feel like the designers have no clue what these characters should be doing visually.  Guilty Gear has characters that go the full monty with Japanese clothing, but the story touches upon the entire Japanese race being an endangered species.  When characters with Japanese names wear these traditional looking clothes, it's not a stretch to assume that an endangered race is holding onto the only thing that they had left of their culture.  Such a simple detail that falls in line with the established story gives the world depth.  Blazblue just sort of tacks on these Japanese-style looks for the sake of appealing to more people.

Another thing that Blazblue has problems with is implying the traits of its characters rather than showing them off.  One of the characters from the new Chrono Phantasma exemplify this well; the first character is Bullet, a female grappler whose presentation as a strong, tomboyish woman acts as an anti-thesis to the weeping mimsy of the cast, Noel.  In her character description, it says that she dislikes skirts, which is supposed to keep with her tough female character image I guess.  Despite this, her character design unironically sports what Ragna's Japanese voice actor refers to as "hot pants."

are you kidding me

If you label characters as having wacky traits in their profiles but never take them into account when actually making the game's scenario you get inconsistencies like this.  I won't say that Guilty Gear did it well, but it at least it showed this to its audience rather than committing the writing faux pas of telling us rather than showing. Without even looking at story mode, there's a pre-fight aniation between Sol and Axl where they argue about what Queen's best album is, which goes hand-in-hand with the rock-inspired world of Guilty Gear.  At the very least, they're acknowledging these traits rather than telling us.  Another thing that sticks in my craw about these profiles is that they detail the characters' origins being real places, but the game's actual setting is a fictional city that seems to sprout a new district as the plot demands it.  With no real connection to the world that it claims to be set in, the city of Kagutsuchi feels like it's suspended in the air, untouched by the settings that the characters are all listed to come from.

Given that I'm talking about a fighting game though, I'm sure that plenty of people will rebut my argument with lines like "It's a fighting game, who cares about characters?  I just want to play online.  Who cares about story mode?"  To which I say that in a game like this, characters are everything.  As a casual player of fighting games, I don't just pick the best characters and roll with them; I pick a character who appeals to me visually, and if their personality and other attributes appeal as well I stick with them, regardless of how bad they are.  In a game like Blazblue, Arakune is the one of the few characters that isn't a mess, so I'm less likely to look into other characters, and thus spend less time with the game overall.  Long story short, because Blazblue couldn't think for itself, a potential customer has been lost.

I saved the counter-argument for last because it segways well into my next counter-argument for Blazblue.  I'm sure that some will argue that if it's got solid  mechanics, then who cares about the story and characters?  Blazblue's emphasis should be on how it's a fighting game, and I have no trouble putting up with shallow characters so long as I have fun playing the game.  My rebuttal is this: next week I'm going to drop the bomb on Blazblue's mechanics.  If Blazblue's story shows its lack of vision, then Blazblue's gameplay shows how this still young intellectual property is already irrelevant amidst the swarm of other fighting games that crowd the market.


All images can be found at http://blazblue.wikia.com/wiki/BlazBlue_Wiki